Monthly Archives: April 2017

Most of the time when Dr. James Tcheng gets a new patient from outside of Duke Health, he starts with a bundle of paper. After his secretary receives a patient’s records—either directly from another doctor’s office or after a request is faxed—and opens them, Tcheng goes through the information, with a sheet of 8½ x 11 paper at his side for taking notes. He starts, usually, with the summary notes. Sometimes, almost all of what he reads is irrelevant. But he must go through everything nevertheless, making sure he misses nothing.

“It’s one of the things that causes me to turn over in bed at night,” said Tcheng, an interventional cardiologist at Duke Health. “I wonder, did I miss something? What should I have been looking for? What wasn’t even said?”

Interoperability, that oft-promised, long sought-after state of data fluidity, has yet to fully arrive in patient records. Too often, patient data move only after someone—a patient, a nurse, a doctor—makes a few phone calls and faxes, stumbling a few times.

THE TAKEAWAYTrue interoperability remains just out of reach, as data stays trapped in documents.

Better standards, alliances among vendors, and new interdependent technologies promise to change that, making data travel with patients as they move through the healthcare system, thereby reducing the burden on providers and achieving the patient-centric part of the triple aim.

But those changes may be more theoretical at this point than actual, and they’ve yet to be adopted across an industry whose members are trying to keep up with new software and standards—standards that themselves are evolving to become more useful. After all, interoperability isn’t just the ability to transmit information, it’s the ability to use the information, too.

Just 6% of providers surveyed by KLAS Research said information they get from outside organizations is reasonably easy to locate within their workflow and “significantly benefits patient care,” and less than one-third said they often or almost always can access data from different electronic health records. Troubles arise when information is outside the electronic health record, when the formatting is clunky, and when information isn’t available when it’s needed.

“We hear pretty regularly that clinicians are frustrated with the amount of time they’re spending documenting instead of taking care of patients,” said Bob Cash, KLAS’ vice president of provider relations.

Part of that frustration stems from the fact that health data don’t often travel as discrete pieces of information but, rather, as entire chunks. “Right now, EHRs are simply very sophisticated systems for managing documents rather than being purveyors of information captured as data,” Tcheng said.

Making data meaningful

When EHRs do successfully talk to one another and transmit data, it’s not just the conversation that matters, it’s how the conversation is structured. In other words, it’s one thing to be able to transmit data, it’s another to be able to transmit it in a way that makes the information meaningful and actionable for providers.

To make a record easily understandable, file formats must be standardized. And they are, to a degree: The Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) standard—which can be used to fulfill the meaningful use Stage 2 requirements—is essentially a collection of templates (along with the requisite coding and framework), including one for documenting a patient’s allergies, medications, problem list and other information, including both structured and unstructured data.

In the end, the documents are sometimes not terribly unlike well-organized PDFs. So providers are often left to wade through pages and pages of text to find what they’re looking for. “They’re big and unwieldy,” said Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. Some providers don’t even look at them.

“We need to break away from the document paradigm of medical records and move toward semi-structured and structured information that actually has pieces of data managed as data itself rather than documents,” Tcheng said. But, he said, “interoperability isn’t just the ability to move a document from one EHR to another.” When you do that, you still must know, for instance, to click on the tab in the EHR for “other information.” And that’s just another click in the seeming infinitude of clicks providers are already making.

the standardwereing. FHIR, which is vendor-neutral, allows people to transmit both documents and smaller pieces of data.

“FHIR is on a trajectory to develop a platform which makes interoperability possible in health systems around the world,” said Dr. Charles Jaffe, CEO of standards organization Health Level Seven International, which developed FHIR.

It portends a time when data aren’t locked in separate documents in separate EHRs—or in separate file folders—but are instead fluid, moving in discrete elements with patients as they go from provider to provider.

“Part of the issue now is hospital and health systems feel it’s all their records, when really we’re just stewards,” said Dr. Thomas Moran, chief medical information executive for Northwestern Memorial HealthCare in Chicago. “The patient still exists outside of the hospital and goes elsewhere, and the patient needs to be able to share their information easily no matter where they go.”

Helping data move

FHIR and similar projects are necessary because data do not move in pieces today. Instead, information is often trapped in various silos, and when it does move between them, it’s in unwieldy documents.

It’s not like this in many other parts of life. “In the financial world, in the retail world, in the social world, data is not held hostage for the benefit of someone else,” said Kerry McDermott, vice president of public policy and communications at the Center for Medical Interoperability. “You’re kind of the digital center of the universe, because if companies don’t treat you that way, you’re going to abandon them, because you have a choice.”

Often, providers and others wonder why EHRs can’t be more like ATMs. The answer, Jaffe said, is that “medicine is more complicated than an ATM.”

EHRs and standard document formats are certainly steps toward interoperability. Though fax machines are still exceedingly—and shockingly—common in healthcare, records are increasingly stored on servers, not shelves. The government essentially required the use of EHRs with the CMS’ meaningful use program, which mandates, among other technological requirements, that providers electronically transfer patients’ summaries of care for at least half the transitions of care.

“Meaningful use and the rules have pushed the market and healthcare systems to do things in a different way and drive toward that culture of sharing,” said Lana Moriarty, director of the Office of Consumer eHealth at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

That will help ease the burden on providers, which is currently significant: Primary-care providers now spend about equal time—three hours or so—on office visits and “desktop medicine,” according to a recent study in Health Affairs.

That proportion may change now that the ONC is working on implementing the 21st Century Cures Act, enacted last December. Notably, the act contains a prohibition of “information blocking,” as well as requirements for EHRs to transmit, receive and accept data.

Eric Helsher, Epic Systems Corp.’s vice president of client success, worries that more regulation might increase the already significant burden on providers—the very thing the ONC and others are trying to avoid. For one, the language about information-blocking is vague enough that it might lead to “frivolous claims,” he said. As for EHR certifications, in the past “well-intended requirements created unintended consequences that lead to burdens on providers.”

He thinks the government should let the private sector solve the problem. Epic, Cerner Corp. and other EHR vendors say they’re working on it. They’ve formed groups such as Carequality, from Sequoia Project (Epic is a founding member); and the Commonwell Health Alliance (Cerner is a founding member) to promote interoperability.

“We have a moral obligation to fix interoperability and not compete on that piece,” Cerner President Zane Burke said. “Today the information doesn’t flow very easily, and the obligation is on the patient to provide that information again and again.” That can lead to multiple tests and bills. “If you can’t get something easily, the easiest way to get it when you have the patient in front of you is to reorder it,” Northwestern’s Moran said.

Carequality and Commonwell recently began working together on interoperability projects, including tackling record location so that patients could be connected to their data from different sources. “We want to get to the point where clinicians just expect to see everything, local and outside, and they don’t necessarily have to know the difference anymore,” said Dave Fuhrmann, Epic’s vice president of research and development.

For that to happen, providers—or their software—would have to know where to pull records from. Commonwell’s record location technology—which creates a “virtual table of contents” that points to the locations of patient information—is one way. Another method—that some see as the interoperability solution of the future—is blockchain, a technology borrowed from the financial industry’s bitcoin.

In healthcare, blockchain could involve a super-secure “distributed ledger” of everywhere a patient has received care. Every time you get medical care, a record of your receipt of that care would be added to the ledger. The ledger, in turn, would point to places providers need to check to create a more complete medical record.

The blockchain is mostly an idea at this point; for the technology to be useful, it’s not enough for the blockchain to simply point to where the data are. The data must be able to be transmitted—they must be interoperable.

When that happens, doctors will be able to be better at their jobs. “If it were all there in front of you,” Tcheng said, “you’d spend a lot less time shuffling through paper or clicking on different tabs,” he said. “You could spend more time actually thinking about what you’re looking at.”​

Cerner Corp. posted strong financial growth in the first quarter despite the continued uncertainty surrounding the Affordable Care Act and healthcare industry, the company said Thursday.

One of the nation’s largest health information technology vendors, Cerner is well positioned to help the healthcare industry lower costs through delivery reform, said Cerner president Zane Burke in an earnings call.

“It’s important to step back from the noise and consider that the dialog around Obamacare and its Republican alternatives is mainly focused on access and insurance reform, not care delivery reform,” he said.

Burke said IT is the strongest force behind lowering costs and boosting quality, and the company supports the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which rewards providers for better outcomes and penalizes them otherwise.

Another key to driving better care and efficiency is interoperability, though it went unmentioned in Cerner’s earnings call. Despite vendors forming alliances like Commonwell (Cerner is a founding member) and pledging to improve connectivity, getting patient data to move freely between EHR systems remains elusive. “Without data liquidity, it’s harder for us to provide precision care for individuals and manage the health of populations,” said Kerry McDermott, vice president of public policy and communications for the Center for Medical Interoperability, in an interview.

Cerner’s first quarter revenue this year was $1.26 billion, up 11% over the first quarter of 2016. System sales and services drove much of the growth, with revenue up 14% over the previous-year quarter. System sales margins were also up.

Those results put Cerner in a good position both objectively and relative to its most direct competitor, which the company did not name but is widely considered to be Epic Systems Corp. “Overall, our competitiveness is as good as it’s ever been,” Burke said. “We believe our primary competitor continues to be in a more defensive stance as a result of numerous factors, including cost overruns.”

If you’re thinking about the future of health care, you should be mindful of Steve Jobs. Whether that comes in the form of optimism or wariness depends on your perspective.

For Charlie Martin, a veteran hospital company CEO and the head of investment firm Martin Ventures, Jobs’ innovative ability is emblematic of the way the slow-moving health care industry will ultimately be transformed: by an outsider entrepreneur who can build something people don’t yet know they need.

In Martin’s view, one of the biggest reasons health care lags other industries and continues to grapple with technology’s inability to communicate and share data seamlessly — an issue known as interoperability — is because the existing players in the industry don’t want it to happen. And that leaves them vulnerable.

“I’m afraid the people who are running it now have too much to lose,” Martin said. “The reason we don’t have interoperability today is most of the people in the system don’t want it.”

But other health care leaders are more confident in the industry’s ability to disrupt itself and support innovation. In fact, that’s one of the ideal outcomes for the Center for Medical Interoperability, a new Nashville-based nonprofit led by some of the industry’s highest-profile executives that is working to improve communication and data sharing between a variety of health care technologies.

“Steve Jobs didn’t have to invent the internet … he built on top of that utility,” said Ed Cantwell, the center’s CEO, seizing upon Martin’s analogy during a Nashville Business Journal panel Tuesday morning.

The center’s mission involves bringing together the providers who buy technology with the vendors who create it, and together finding a way to make medical devices and software communicate just as easily as bank ATM cards or a VCR and a television. With the help of a framework established by the center, Cantwell argued, innovators can more easily push health care forward, whether they’re coming from inside the industry or elsewhere.

Today I had the honor of delivering the keynote speech at the Nashville Business Journal’s Health Care of the Future event at the Music City Center. It was a challenge to tackle this vast subject in just 15 minutes. Following is the text of my speech, which focuses on three of the many factors that define the future of healthcare, consumers, advanced data analytics and care coordination, and covers some of the exciting efforts underway at HCA. I hope you find it interesting.

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Thank you for the kind introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here with this esteemed group. I’d like to set the stage for today’s discussion by focusing on three main areas – the future of health care, the importance of interoperability and the opportunities that exist for Nashville.

Future of Health Care

Some people say if you want to know the future of health care, just look at the present day state of being for any other industry. Now, while it may be true that health care has ample room to improve, as CEO of one of the largest healthcare companies in the U.S., I take issue with such a broad generalization. Yes it’s true that the industry has opportunity to improve how it leverages technology, meets evolving consumer demands, and conducts business to deliver the best results possible…in the shortest timeframe…at an affordable price. But I know the exciting developments taking place within this industry, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that not all providers are created equally. I’ll talk a little more about that in a minute, but let me just narrow our focus a bit. Many factors define the future of health care, some we can control, others we can’t – Washington, D.C. and genetics are the first that spring to mind. But since we can’t spend the week here discussing this, I’m going to focus on three that are particularly relevant to the interoperability dialogue – consumers, advanced data analytics and care coordination.

First, we all know that consumer expectations continue to rise and expand. We’re not just competing within the healthcare industry, but beyond it. The seamless, convenient, secure experiences enjoyed in other facets of life – like retail, finance and transportation – are now expected in health care. It’s no longer about Provider A versus Provider B; it’s about Provider A compared against Starbucks, Amazon and Uber. This holds especially true among younger generations, who have grown up with real-time, on demand access to information. It doesn’t matter whether it’s to answer a random question, pay a bill, listen to music or get directions – accurate information is readily available…and personal information is safeguarded. Grocery shopping and buying clothes no longer require a trip to the store. You can order online or on an app and have anything shipped to your house – shopping that’s convenient for you, conducted privately, securely and on your timeframe. Consumers expect higher levels of service to get what they want, when they want it. They also expect greater value and transparency. They want to know how much something is going to cost (before buying it) and how it’s supposed to perform (or its quality). They’ll determine for themselves what constitutes value.

So what are the implications of this for health care? When we talk of healthcare consumers, we have to consider both the patient and those who provide the care. The tools and technologies we use to take care of people have to work well together in order to be useful to clinicians and other caregivers. The more cohesive the toolset, the better able we are to meet consumer expectations – and we all know that satisfaction has real implications for the bottom line.

Health care is often thought of in two contexts – one at the individual level and one at the population level. The need to deliver person-centered care for individuals and manage the health of populations will continue to grow in importance. At HCA, we have a 50-year tradition of providing patient-centered care, but the expectations for patients have changed. Traditionally when we have conducted consumer research about one of our facilities, satisfaction related to the overall outcome, and people tended to be generous in their assessments. Well today, things are different. Now patient-centric care means making my care about me. Timely care means not only when I need it, but when I want it. Convenience is about not just whether there is a hospital close enough to my home to make me feel safe, it’s about a network for multi-level care facilities that are available where and when I want to access that care. And, the care is tailored to my unique biological, genetic and social factors, as well as my cultural and language preferences. Consumers will continue to demand greater value and emphasize outcomes that are meaningful to them, especially as healthcare costs take up more of their household budgets. They will further embrace digital and social media platforms to share their experiences and increase transparency, so providers need to be prepared for growing scrutiny and readily respond to feedback. At HCA, we have developed an extensive reputation management team whose sole purpose is to monitor and engage with consumers of care from our facilities, to ensure their experiences are satisfactory, and if we fall short of the mark, to intervene – real-time – and resolve whatever issues those patients or their caregivers may have.

Population health is about the distribution and determinants of health outcomes. It focuses on illness prevention and management of illness when it is present. Aspects of population health management include nutrition guidelines, encouragement and availability of appropriate physical activity, assistance with tobacco cessation and avoidance, and addressing vulnerabilities such as poverty, literacy and access to care. Healthy consumers at the individual level lead to healthier populations, so it’s imperative that we establish meaningful relationships with those we care for and engage them in managing their health. We also seek to proactively manage entire populations rather than being reactive and treating those who present at the hospital or office with symptoms. We are fortunate in Middle Tennessee to have the support and engagement of leaders like Mayor Berry and Governor Haslam, who have initiated and advanced programs at the community and state levels, to support and encourage wellness and access to care, particularly for some of our most vulnerable populations. All of this, of course, relies on data.

This brings us to the second factor in the future of health care, advanced data analytics. Advanced data analytics fuels growth and competition, serves as a primary driver of both patient-centered care and population health management, and enables data-driven quality improvement and scientific discovery. It’s predicated on the ability to move from capturing data to creating knowledge and applying wisdom.

The term big data has become commonplace in health care. Its role is to help us see and understand the relationships within and among pieces of information. These include hidden patterns, unknown correlations, trends, preferences and other information useful to clinical care and operations. Big data are defined by the three V’s – volume, variety and velocity. Volume refers to the amount of data. HCA, for example, has generated over 120 petabytes – that’s enough to fill the planet Jupiter with data. The scale at which we can learn and make discoveries is tremendous. Variety refers to the different types of data. We have to be able to learn from both structured data, like lab results and electronic medication orders, and the more complicated unstructured data, like images and doctor’s notes. I recently returned from a health care study mission in London with the Nashville Health Care Council, and during one session we were given a presentation by a duo of researchers whose company was acquired by Google. When I asked them about their experiences with unstructured data, they indicated this was a challenging area, one that is difficult to mine for useful information. But I will tell you that HCA is applying big data analysis in unstructured spaces, to glean information in the clinical, communications and billing spaces. We have the ability to identify lung cancer tumors that might otherwise have gone undetected because their presence in a scan was noted as a secondary care issue; we can identify the appropriate ways in which to address the concerns of patients based on stated cultural reference points that are important to them; and we can use language in billing disputes with payors that creates a greater opportunity for success. All of these advancements stem from analysis of unstructured big data.

Velocity refers to the speed of data processing, which has been drastically reduced by advances in computing power. Our aim is to achieve consistent, real-time analytics to assist clinicians at the point of decision. You can add a fourth V for veracity, which refers to the quality of the data and our ability to trust their accuracy.

Analytics is a never-ending realm of discovery. Efforts to build the collective body of wisdom pertaining to the human condition, precisely diagnose conditions, and develop targeted treatments will continue to grow. It was groundbreaking when the human genome was sequenced in 2003. Today, researchers have expanded beyond genomics (study of the genome) to include the study of proteins, the study of metabolism, and the study of microbes. The more detailed our knowledge, the more precise the person-centered care will be.

The broader our knowledge of individuals, the better we can help them as well. Health care would benefit from greater integration of nontraditional sources of data that account for environmental and socio-economic factors affecting the people for whom we care. Your doctor doesn’t know how often you eat hot chicken and ice cream, but your credit card does. This type of information could aid, for example, in predicting which of our patients are more likely to be readmitted after surgery. It might not be the individual with the least favorable clinical metrics; rather, it’s the person with the low credit score, which could indicate they don’t have the necessary support network to aid in their recovery. If we have a more complete picture of what is going on with an individual, we can better cater to his or her needs. We also can better understand the decision tree linking care choices to outcomes.

Advanced data analytics also further our goal of providing the safest, most efficient care possible. Real-time monitoring that integrates diverse clinical data points enables us to detect problems before a patient experiences decompensation. Consider the example of sepsis, a life-threatening bloodstream infection. Detecting its onset so that early intervention can be initiated can be the difference between life and death. The symptoms on their own – quickened breathing, accelerated heart rate, unusually high or low core temperature, and abnormally high or low white blood cell count – may not trigger concern as stand-alone data points. However, when taken together, we see a different picture – one that an algorithm is better suited to detect than a busy clinician. HCA is piloting a project that assists our caregivers with detection of sepsis in patients, a capability that is offering earlier detection of as much as 24 hours, and can be a critical advantage in fighting the deadly effects of sepsis.

Let’s turn to our third factor, care coordination. The National Academy of Medicine identifies care coordination as a key strategy with the potential to improve the effectiveness, safety, and efficiency of the U.S. healthcare system. Care coordination involves deliberately organizing patient care activities and sharing information among all of the participants concerned with a patient’s care. The patient’s needs and preferences are known ahead of time and securely communicated at the right time to the right people. Well-designed, targeted care coordination can improve outcomes for everyone – patients, providers and payors. It’s essential that coordination reach across all aspects of the care continuum – hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, first responders, long-term care facilities, home health, palliative care, community-based services, and payors. The length of this list speaks to the complexity of care coordination.

Care coordination is further exacerbated by the complexity of the needs facing an aging population with a higher prevalence of chronic disease and co-morbidities. We need robust coordination to improve their outcomes and care experience. Yet, these individuals are treated in a multitude of care settings that vary in their ability to coordinate care.

Importance of Interoperability

The common thread to satisfying consumers and enabling advanced data analytics and seamless care coordination is interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of devices and systems to exchange and use electronic information from other devices and systems without special effort on the part of the user. In health care, this speaks to the capability of our technical underpinnings to support data liquidity – when patient information moves freely and securely from the point of care — be that a hospital bed, doctor’s office or someone’s home– to wherever it is needed, from a clinical decision-making app or electronic health record to an analytics engine, clinical trial repository or public health registry. Interoperability of the technologies used in patient care enables the liquidity of data, without which it is more difficult to meet our goals of providing individualized care and managing the health of populations.

Unfortunately, health care is the only major industry that lacks an agreed-upon architecture for connecting the technologies and applications used across the continuum of care. This leaves the vast majority of medical devices, electronic health records and other IT systems unable to exchange information with ease at an affordable cost. Various systems and equipment typically are purchased from different manufacturers and each comes with its own proprietary interface technology. This means hospitals have to spend scarce time and money setting up each technology in a different way, instead of being able to rely on a consistent means for connectivity. Furthermore, hospitals usually have to invest in separate “middleware” systems to pull together all the disparate pieces of technology to feed data from bedside devices to EHRs, data warehouses and other applications that aid in clinical decision-making, research, analytics and consumer engagement. Many, especially older, devices don’t even connect; they require manual reading and data entry. As a nation, we employ hundreds of thousands of people to deal with this inefficiency.

The current lack of interoperability can compromise patient safety, undermine care quality and outcomes, contribute to clinician fatigue and waste billions of dollars a year. In fact, one study found that the lack of medical device interoperability costs the U.S. health system over $30 billion a year. As you would expect, it also impedes innovation, which may be the biggest missed opportunity for health care. Innovators in health care face significant obstacles accessing data, validating solutions, integrating into highly-configured environments, and scaling implementations across varied settings. As a result, the innovation community often steers clear of the healthcare market because navigating it simply is too difficult. So the entrenched, proprietary interests we need to disrupt for advancement become further entrenched.

By contrast, the seamless exchange of information would improve care, increase operational efficiency and lower costs. It would facilitate care coordination, enable informatics and advanced analytics, reduce clinician workload and increase the return on existing technologies. To realize these benefits, we must rethink how to connect the disparate pieces involved in end-to-end patient care both within and across care settings. We need to repair the technical architecture supporting health care so we have a solid foundation upon which to innovate and develop solutions that will transform care for our nation.

Opportunity for Nashville

This leads us to the opportunity for Nashville. Our unparalleled expertise in how to deliver care positions us to disrupt the status quo. We have the leverage of a $78 billion healthcare industry to compel change and drive innovation. The time is ripe to make ourselves known for the number of lives we improve, not just the number of beds we manage. Our healthcare community encompasses the entire continuum of care, and we can demonstrate how to make end-to-end interoperability a reality, reaping its benefits for our citizens and businesses alike.

We are fortunate that the Center for Medical Interoperability chose Nashville as its headquarters. For those less familiar with the Center, it’s a nonprofit cooperative research and development lab founded by health systems to simplify and advance data-sharing among medical technologies and systems. The Center provides a centralized, vendor-neutral approach to performing technical work that enables person-centered care, testing and certifying devices and systems, and promoting the adoption of scalable solutions. I have the privilege of serving on the board of directors alongside several Nashville healthcare leaders, including Dr. Mike Schatzlein, who chairs the board.

Nashville can be a living lab for data liquidity. Our collaborative culture, coupled with the depth and breadth of our healthcare community, enable us to better integrate the many determinants of health – genetic, biological, environmental, socio-economic, lifestyle and wellness. We can forge private-public partnerships that innovate approaches to freely and securely sharing data in service of patient-centered care and population health.

So what does this all mean? In short, future health care will be guided by consumer expectations, informed by advanced data analytics, and supported by robust care coordination. To ensure data liquidity and the best possible outcomes, we must achieve end-to-end interoperability across the continuum of care. Nashville has unique advantages to emerge as a true leader in driving healthcare transformation, and we cannot let this window of opportunity close. Thank you.

The Center for Medical Interoperability officially opened its headquarters this week and launched a testing and certification laboratory with the aim of improving patient safety and care. The center is a 501(c)(3) cooperative research and development lab founded by health systems to simplify and advance data sharing among medical technologies and systems.

The center’s board includes CEOs from the following health systems: Ascension Health, Carilion Clinic, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Community Health Systems, Hospital Corporation of America, Hennepin Healthcare System, LifePoint Health, Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, RWJBarnabas, Scripps Health, UNC Health Care System, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The organization’s membership consists of health systems and other provider organizations committed to eliminating current barriers to swift and seamless communication of patient information among medical devices and electronic health records. This will improve patient care by providing clinicians with quick and easy access to all relevant patient data in real time, according to a press release.

The lab, located in Nashville, serves as a research and development arm for its members to improve interoperability. The center’s technical experts and visiting engineers from industry work together to develop IT architectures, interfaces and specifications that can be consistently deployed by health systems, medical device manufacturers, electronic health record vendors and others. The lab certifies devices and software that meet the center’s technical specifications. Clinicians explore the impact of technologies within the Transformation Learning Center at the lab to ensure solutions are safe, useful and satisfying for patients and their care teams.

“The opening of the headquarters and launch of the lab are enormous steps toward addressing the difficulties that health systems share in getting medical devices and electronic health records to ‘talk’ to each other,” Mike Schatzlein, M.D., chair of the center’s board, said in a statement. “All too often, this prevents physicians and other caregivers from having complete information about a patient readily available when they make important treatment decisions. Enabling this type of seamless communication is crucial to improving patient safety and reducing clinician burnout.”

He’s got the hospitals on his side. He’s been courting the vendors. Now he’s ready to see what they can do together.

“He” is Ed Cantwell, CEO of the Center for Medical Interoperability, a new Nashville-based nonprofit that has brought together some of the industry’s biggest power players to improve the way health care technologies work together. Now that its Charlotte Avenue home is officially open for business, the center is ready to start pursuing its mission in a big way, Cantwell said.

“As of today we’ll go pretty visible,” Cantwell said, taking a break from chatting up a veritable who’s-who of Nashville’s health care industry during the center’s official grand opening April 6.

As I’ve written previously, interoperability — more specifically, the lack thereof — is one of the biggest issues facing Nashville’s health care community, and it’s one the leader of nearly all the area’s major players have joined together to solve. The center’s board includes the chief executives of HCA Holdings Inc., Community Health Systems Inc., LifePoint Health Inc. and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, among others. The board is chaired by Mike Schatzlein, formerly a top executive with Saint Thomas Health and its parent company, St. Louis-based Ascension.

Cantwell said the center’s board has identified its early priorities, and he and his team have begun to build connections with the technology companies creating the medial devices and software systems that need to communicate more seamlessly. Getting those tech vendors and the providers to work on solving this problem is a bit like a “game of chess,” Cantwell said, but right now “everybody’s behaving pretty well.”

“I don’t think any vendor in health care feels good about the next 10 years,” Cantwell said, which means those vendors are willing to work with providers on establishing and abiding by standards in the health-technology industry.

Cantwell is also passionate about working with Nashville and its leaders to promote “person-centered connected health,” which involves individuals taking ownership of their health records in a way that makes it easier for them to move from provider to provider without vital information being lost. That sort of “personal longitudinal health record” is a key step toward true interoperability, he said. If Nashville can master that and related issues, Cantwell argues, the city can truly claim its place as a capital of health care’s future.

“This is really the cause that answers the Brookings Institution challenge,” Cantwell said, referring to a recent report suggesting Nashville isn’t doing everything it could to capitalize on opportunities for health-technology dominance.

Look for more coverage on interoperability on NashvilleBusinessJournal.com next week, when a panel of leaders in the industry, including HCA Holdings Inc. CEO Milton Johnson, will gather to talk about the challenges and opportunity in the space.

Nashville is home to a new 16,000-square-foot Center for Medical Interoperability that will be focused on simplifying and advancing health data sharing across technologies and systems.

Thursday is the grand opening of the center, which is a membership-based organization that includes what is described as the first-of-its-kind testing and certification laboratory for devices and systems, focused on finding solutions to healthcare’s daunting interoperability challenges.

Several of the center’s members are based or headquartered in Nashville, including Community Health Systems, HCA Healthcare and Vanderbilt University.

“If you walk into any hospital, they all struggle with getting their devices to work together, getting the devices to work with the EHRs and getting the patient information moving to wherever it needs to go,” says Kerry McDermott, vice president of public policy and communications at the Center for Medical Interoperability.

The initial focus of the center will be “inside the hospital” in acute care settings such as the ICU, where patients are “surrounded by dozens of medical devices—each of which knows something valuable about the patient, but we don’t have a streamlined way to aggregate all that data to make it useful for clinicians who need to make real-time important treatment decisions,” according to McDermott.

“Healthcare, until now, has not had a dedicated technical resource where engineers come to work every day targeting that specific problem of how we achieve better data sharing across our medical technologies and systems,” she contends.

The center’s 501(c)(3) cooperative research and development lab, founded with $10 million in initial funding from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, will be used to develop, test, and certify devices and software that meet its goal of developing “vendor-neutral blueprints that enable interoperability within health systems” and support “real time one-to-many communication, two-way data exchange, plug-and-play integration of devices and systems, the use of standards and the highest level of security.”

According to McDermott, the major missing ingredient for healthcare is the lack of an agreed-upon architecture for how the different pieces of technology should fit together within hospital operations. She says the center’s membership includes hospitals and health systems that are dedicated to solving shared technical challenges with standards-based, plug-and-play solutions. Ultimately, McDermott sees certification from its lab as being the equivalent of the “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” for medical technology.

Among the emerging interoperability standards that the center is looking to leverage is Health Level 7 International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application programming interface, particularly on the device side. While McDermott contends that FHIR has tremendous potential, she believes there’s a lot more work to be done to make it a mature standard.

“The lab will help bring about a ‘plug-and-play’ environment for healthcare in which there is assured interoperability and connectivity inside and outside the hospital,” said Ed Cantwell, president and CEO of the Center for Medical Interoperability. “An analogy would be the global ATM network that the banking industry uses to facilitate seamless and secure communication among a wide variety of equipment and institutions.”

In addition, the lab includes a Transformation Learning Center (TLC), a resource dedicated to “clinical collaboration” where clinicians explore the impact of technologies “to ensure solutions are safe, useful and satisfying for patients and their care teams.” McDermott says clinicians will use the TLC to develop use cases and capture clinical requirements for what they need.

The concept for the center was first developed in 2011 through researching a standards-based approach to medical device interoperability at the Gary and Mary West Health Institute, adds McDermott. In 2015, the center’s board of directors was formed, consisting of executives drawn from some of the nation’s largest health systems, as well as academic medical centers and rural providers, which represent more than 50 percent of the purchasing power of healthcare, she says.

“We’re really trying to synergize the efforts of these different purchasers, which isn’t to say that the center gets involved in the purchasing decisions made by health systems,” McDermott concludes. “But what we do is provide them with a technical lab that is the focal point for working with the vendors—engineers from industry alongside engineers from the center and the membership—on developing what is the right architecture for healthcare.”

The Center for Medical Interoperability on April 6 opened its headquarters in Nashville, Tenn.

The center is a joint initiative of Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America; Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems; Brentwood, Tenn.-based LifePoint Health; St. Louis-based Ascension Health; and Nashville-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center, among other U.S. healthcare providers.

The center, which serves as a research and development laboratory, will bring its members together to develop new interoperability solutions. Technical experts and engineers will develop IT architectures and interfaces to help health systems share data between medical devices and EHRs. The center will also certify devices and software that meet its technical specifications.

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About the Center

The Center for Medical Interoperability is a 501(c)(3) cooperative research and development lab founded by health systems to simplify and advance data sharing among medical technologies and systems. We provide a centralized, vendor-neutral approach to performing technical work that enables person-centered care, testing and certifying devices and systems, and promoting the adoption of scalable solutions.

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Membership in the Center is an opportunity – to chart a course that will change our country forever, to touch countless lives now and for generations to come, to shape the future of care delivery. Learn More »